Truly, truly, Bitcoin is a failure

There will be a number of proof-of-stake systems launching this year. I
could say that they operate under a slightly different threat model than
Bitcoin: they are "permissionless" in that anyone can spin up their own
chain at any time and interoperate with other chains, but each chain is
operated by what is effectively a cabal, which does not fit some
people's definition of what "permissionless" and "decentralized" should
mean...
...except the vicious cycle of proof-of-work has lead to the exact sort
of cabal proponents of some platonic ideal of "decentralized" hope to
prevent: it only takes two mining pools, either in collusion or through
compromise, to pull of a so-called 51% attack against Bitcoin with the
current miner distribution, and greater-than-99% of all Bitcoin
transactions will be confirmed by less than a dozen mining pools. The
experiment is a failure: proof-of-work does not work and is not a valid
solution to the "decentralization" problem. Several chains operated by
several cabals sounds like it does a better job of being "decentralized"
than one chain operated by one cabal.